CHAPTER TWENTY

As the hours wore on Rudi grew accustomed to the new landscape, so that the sense of impending danger he’d felt at first had diminished. There seemed little danger of enemies approaching unobserved across the bleak and open moor. Hanna, on the other hand, seemed enchanted with the place. It was so different to any environment she’d ever seen before. She kept stopping to look at some plant or other with comments he didn’t understand about their potential medicinal properties. A few she picked, and tucked away in her satchel for later.

One plant they could both have done without was the ubiquitous bracken, which snagged at their clothes, a constant irritation. Rudi at least had the protection of his breeches, their stout fabric chosen for its resistance to the similar hazards of the forest, but Hanna’s skirt was a light summer weave and hardly any use at all in this regard. Before long her calves were covered in small scratches, which she ignored stoically. Time and again she had to pause to shake some small piece of detritus from her shoe.

Despite the discomfort she was determined to remain cheerful. She made bright remarks about the warmth of the sun and the pleasantness of the sweet-smelling breeze as though they were simply out for a summer stroll. She even picked a sprig of vivid purple heather, a colour Rudi had never imagined a plant could be, and tucked it behind her ear, where it somehow seemed to accentuate the colour of her hair.

Gradually the stream picked up its pace and widened a little, but there was still no sign of the river Rudi hoped it would lead them to. He had only the vaguest idea of what the Reik would look like. He was unable to imagine a stretch of open water so wide you could barely see the other bank, but he was pretty sure it would be hard to miss.

“Isn’t east that way?” Hanna asked, shortly after noon. They’d paused to eat some of the cold rabbit, with their backs against a large moss-covered rock which had absorbed the pleasant summer heat. She gestured to their left, where the shadows had begun to lengthen.

Rudi nodded, trying to seem blasé. He’d been beginning to wonder that himself, but it had been hard to be sure with the sun almost directly overhead.

“I think so,” he said, taking another bite of rabbit to try and seem calm. “The stream seems to be flowing south now.”

“Perhaps we should strike across country, then,” Hanna suggested. Rudi shook his head.

“We’ve nothing to carry any water in,” he pointed out. “And the stream’s bound to reach the river eventually.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Hanna said, seeming relieved at this observation. Rudi suspected she was as reluctant to leave the security of the watercourse as he was. Over the last couple of days it had become a familiar presence in their lives, almost the only thing they had left which gave them any sense of stability.

By nightfall it remained pointing resolutely to the south, and Rudi was beginning to think it had even turned westward a little. He pushed the thought from his mind as best he could, and began looking for a place to make camp.

In the end they’d had to settle for a hollow in the ground, which at least sheltered them from the worst of the increasingly chill wind. They managed to find enough stones before the light went to fashion a functional fire pit. Rudi collected as much of the dry scrub as he could find, piled it up carefully, and took the precious tinderbox from his pack.

He was unable to coax a spark from the flint and steel sufficient to start a flame, and his mood darkened with the lowering sky. It was dusk already, and without a fire they faced a bleak night at best. At worst they would be left at the mercy of whatever predators roamed this strange wilderness.

“Let me try,” Hanna said, stretching out a hand for it. “If you’re going to set some snares you’d better do it while there’s still some daylight left.” Rudi acquiesced grudgingly, his hurt pride eventually displaced by logic. He moved away from the makeshift camp. There was no point setting traps where the rabbits could get wind of them. At least the rabbits seemed to be abundant in this wilderness, there were plenty of signs of their presence, and so they should be able to replenish their meagre store of food.

Not that it would do them much good without a fire to cook the carcasses with, of course…

Despite his forebodings, however, he was greeted by a cheerful blaze when he returned to the makeshift camp.

“You’ve obviously got a knack for this sort of thing,” he said, trying not to sound grudging. Hanna smiled; the first spontaneous expression of happiness he’d seen on her face since they’d fled from Kohlstadt.

“It wouldn’t make any difference without your foraging skills,” she said, returning the compliment.

The night passed uneventfully, despite his wariness, and the following day was almost a repeat of the previous one. The stream continued to grow in strength and volume, drawing them onwards despite its increased deviation from the direction they assumed both the river and the city they sought lay in.

“It’s no bad thing,” Rudi said, as they made their way through a narrow defile along the banks of a sudden display of rapids. “If anyone was trying to follow us they’d be leagues away by now.”

“Good thing too,” Hanna added, hopping over a small cleft in the underlying rock.

That night they found a section of broken stone wall and slept in its lee, grateful for the shelter it afforded against the wind. This time Rudi didn’t even try to make a fire, he just left Hanna to it and went off to set his snares again, completely confident that she would have kindled a flame before he got back.

Morrslieb was waning now and Mannslieb growing fuller, so the night, if anything, was a little darker than it had been, but what light there was seemed purer, less corrupt. Rudi sat with his back to the wall, wondering who had shaped these stones and what had happened to them. Something akin to the Altmans’ fate, he supposed, but whatever it was, it had happened a long time ago. There were no signs that anything bigger than a fox had been here in decades. But the presence of the wall meant they were getting nearer to civilisation.

The thought was both encouraging and alarming. They might be approaching Marienburg, or some way of getting there, but civilisation meant people. And that could mean enemies.

He listened to Hanna’s regular breathing, and watched the faint rise and fall of her malodorous blanket in the moonlight. He yawned. Time enough to worry about Gerhard and whoever else he might have sent after them in the morning.

The dawn woke them as it always did, and Rudi went off to check his traps. Two of them were full. He hung the little bodies on his belt as usual, conscious that he was getting into the swing of a routine. True, their diet was getting a little monotonous, but at least they were in no danger of starving and he was sure the mounting collection of rabbit pelts would be worth a copper or two when they found somewhere to trade with them.

As the sun rose he was able to see more of their immediate surroundings finding his guess about the wall they’d sheltered behind was more or less accurate. It had once marked the boundary of a field, the shape of which could still be discerned sketched in clumps of tumbled rubble. Curious he walked on, towards the far boundary, wondering if any other signs of habitation remained. Clearly this had once been a well-tended smallholding, carefully sited to take advantage of the water supply afforded by the stream.

His guess was confirmed as he reached the far edge of the old field. A few scattered carrot tops waved defiantly above the encroaching bracken, which had all but reclaimed them. He stooped to pull a few as he passed. They were stunted, misshapen things, but they were edible, and he was sure Hanna would welcome the change in their diet.

“Hanna!” he called, waving to attract her attention as a flash of blonde hair popped up above the now-distant wall. “Look at this!” He waited until she’d scrambled over it, and had started trotting towards him, before returning his attention to the ruins of the cottage he’d found.

Despite his gloomy impressions of the previous night, it was clear that it was neglect rather than violence that had killed this place. The remains of the roof thatch lay tumbled across the floor, but most of the walls were still intact. The wood of the window frames had succumbed to rot for the most part, and the door hung crooked from a single hinge, which gave way as he pushed gently at it. The slab of boards fell to the ground with a crack like a falling tree branch as it split into several sections, the wood dry and powdery within.

“Is it safe?” Hanna asked, materialising at his elbow. Her cheeks were flushed from running, and she smelled pleasantly of light perspiration and the plants she’d crushed on her journey.

“I don’t know,” Rudi replied, edging inside. The stonework was slick with mildew, and a couple of roof timbers lay on the ground inside. Where the floor had been the ubiquitous bracken had seeded itself, so everything felt faintly springy underfoot.

“Is there anything here we can use?” Hanna wondered, venturing in after him. Rudi glanced around.

“I doubt it.” Other scavengers had obviously been here before them, and taken anything worth having. A few broken boards, half buried in the encroaching scrub, hinted at long-decayed shelves or furnishings, but anything they’d held was long gone. Hanna nodded, reluctantly.

“Best eat and get going, then.”

“I suppose so.” Rudi followed her outside, and took a last look around. “Do you see that?”

“See what?” She followed his pointing finger with her gaze, and shrugged. Rudi walked a few paces to confirm his guess, and nodded.

“There’s a track here. Or was, at least.” The bracken here was different; it was shorter and patchier, marking a line across the moorland he could follow quite easily. “It must lead somewhere.”

“You said that about the stream,” Hanna reminded him. Rudi nodded.

“I suppose so. But there might be a village or something that way.” He pointed. “We could trade the pelts, and ask for directions.”

“Or get arrested as heretics…” Hanna finished.

“I suppose you’re right,” Rudi conceded. “But we have to risk it some time.”

They continued debating the point over breakfast. The carrots, once washed free of soil in the stream, were sweet and crunchy, a delightful change in their diet which both companions relished. Living almost entirely on meat wasn’t the best of ideas, Hanna said, going into some detail about the various imbalances of the humours which were likely to result. Rudi wasn’t exactly sure what humours were, but he didn’t like the sound of them at all.

At length they gathered up their packs and, after pulling up all the carrots they could readily find, they set off along the stream bank again. The trail from the abandoned farm, though tempting, was too much of an unknown quantity to risk. It was better, they agreed, to stick to the watercourse, and hope that when it finally brought them close to an inhabited area it would be far enough from Kohlstadt for no one to have heard of Gerhard’s arrest warrant.

“After all,” Hanna pointed out, “this can’t be the only farmstead to have used the stream for irrigation.”

At first, as they plodded along, Rudi wondered if it was just his imagination, but after a while he was sure of it; the water was flowing faster than before.

“We must be going downhill,” Hanna said, evidently noticing the phenomenon too. Rudi nodded.

“Perhaps we’re getting nearer the river.” A thin mist of white vapour became visible over the next undulation in the moor, around which the stream curved ahead of them. Rudi broke into a trot, eager to see if he was right. Hanna watched him go with an expression of amused tolerance for a moment then hurried up too. As they began to round the hillock, Rudi became aware of a low, bass rumbling, like distant thunder. He looked up expectantly, but the sky was the same rich blue it had been all summer, the only clouds visible faint skeins of white, like floating feathers.

“Look out!” Hanna grabbed his arm just as his foot slipped on a spray-slick rock. He fell back hard against unyielding stone, the breath driven painfully from his body.

“What did you do that for?” he snapped, rising onto a throbbing knee, and glaring at her. Hanna simply gestured behind him.

Rudi turned, and gasped, his ill temper falling away like the waters below him. The stream had vanished into a gaping hole in the ground, a dark mouth that swallowed it as though it had never been. If Hanna hadn’t been so quick he would have tumbled into it, and been lost forever.

“What on earth is that?” he asked, stunned. He’d never dreamed that water could do anything like this. It soaked into the ground of course, but that was in a slow and orderly fashion. Hanna looked equally mystified.

“I’ve no idea,” she said. “Maybe there’s a cave down there or something.”

For a moment Rudi found himself contemplating ways of climbing down the rock walls confining the torrent, and continuing to follow it. But there was no point in even thinking about it. It would be suicide to try, and even if they survived the descent there was no guarantee that the watercourse would ever surface again.

“What do we do now?” Hanna said, evidently coming to the same conclusion. Rudi shrugged.

“We’ll have to go back, and try the path.” Briefly he considered the possibility of continuing across the moor in the same direction and hoping to find where the stream emerged, if it ever did. But he dismissed the idea at once. They’d get lost for certain, and there was no guarantee that they’d ever find their way back to civilisation. And Marienburg would be getting further away than ever.

“I think you’re right,” Hanna agreed, but her tone was enough to tell him how little she liked the idea.

They made it back to the abandoned farmstead shortly after noon, and sat by the ashes of their campfire to eat with a curious sense of futility. Afterwards they set out along the overgrown track with a renewed sense of trepidation. Rudi knew it was foolish to feel disappointed, as though the stream had betrayed them somehow, but he resolved to heed the lesson nevertheless. From now on nothing could be relied on.

His tracking skills picked out the old path easily, and they followed it for some time without incident. It meandered across the moor, taking the line of least effort. He began to realise that it must once have been wide enough for a horse-drawn cart to negotiate. That implied that wherever they were going had a market, or access to one.

The longer they walked, the more desultory became their conversation. Their apprehension increased with every step. When they did speak it was to express some fear about where they were going, or to suggest some plan to cope with that contingency. Both of them became convinced that the track would lead to the heart of a bustling village, and that the population would instantly recognise them.

So when it came to an end at last, and the two fugitives found themselves standing on a wide road of hard-packed earth without a soul in sight, it was hard not to feel a sense of anti-climax.

“Which way do you think?” Rudi asked, glancing up and down it. It seemed to be running roughly northeast to southwest, and there was no clue as to what lay in either direction.

“That way.” Hanna looked up from a curiously shaped stone a few yards away, and gestured southwest. Rudi pointed in the other direction.

“Marienburg should be that way.”

“Well Kohlstadt definitely is.” Now he was closer to her, he could see that Hanna was pointing to letters chiselled into the stone. “See?” She indicated a line of them, which presumably spelled out the name of the village, next to an arrow pointing in the direction he’d indicated. Rudi nodded, silently appalled at his naivety. Unable to read the warning, he would have set off directly into the arms of their enemy.

“What does the other one say?” he asked, once again forcibly reminded of the advantages of literacy.

“Kallcaat,” Hanna said instantly. “No indication of how far that is, though.”

“I think I’ve heard of it.” The name sounded vaguely familiar, and after a moment he remembered Magnus mentioning it once. Something to do with a barge he was chartering. “I think there’s a wharf there.”

“I suppose we’ll find out soon enough,” Hanna said, starting to walk in the direction of the arrow. After a moment Rudi fell into step beside her. Things were definitely looking up, he thought. If Kallcaat had a wharf then they could get passage on a riverboat there, and be in Marienburg in no time. To his vague surprise he found himself smiling.